Does interest alignment between hotels and online travel agencies intensify review manipulations?

Purpose: This study examines whether a higher interest alignment between online travel agencies (OTAs; hosting platform) and hotels (business owners) will intensify review manipulation activities. Design/methodology/approach: With a panel data set collected from a Chinese online travel agency and a travel search engine, the authors develop a matching-based difference-indifference approach to examine the presence of partnership-intensified review manipulation. Findings: The authors find that the ratings of agency's partner hotels (with a higher interest alignment) are abnormally higher than those of matched non-partner hotels (with a lower interest alignment), after they are benchmarked with their ratings on the search engine (without a partnership business model). Further, the analysis results indicate that this partnership-intensified manipulation deteriorates the hotel's sales performance because of damaged customer trust and satisfaction. Originality/value: Previous studies implicitly assume that review manipulator is independent from the hosting platform. This is the first study examining the role of the hosting platform in review manipulations.